tagged w/ Multiracial
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What a tangle of racial controversies to embroil politicians, the media, and the public in recent days: Glenn Beck insisted that African-American is a "bogus, PC-term," the Census bureau insisted on keeping "Negro" among its list of racial categories, and Senator Harry Reid confessed to saying the President's appeal derives from his (relatively) fair skin and Negro-free dialect.
Forgive, for a moment, some biographical speculation: Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would not likely be bothered by these racial brushfires. Instead, he would be appalled by the larger afflictions engulfing this nation, all of which threaten the realization of his dream - not the therapeutic, saccharine dream peddled to us in candle-lit commemorations, but the urgent dream anchored by his gritty work.
The just-released jobs report shows 85,000 more jobs lost in December, with startling unemployment across the board: Teenagers (27 percent), Blacks (16.2 percent), Hispanics (12.9 percent), Whites (9 percent), and the general population at 10 percent and rising.
Socio-economic progress in the United States is no better today then during the latter years of Dr. King's life. America faces the same poverty rate today (13.2 percent) that Dr. King denounced in 1968 (12.8 percent). Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty in that time span has grown from 25 million to a whopping 40 million, including 12 million children.
As the House and Senate dither over healthcare reform, and tens of millions of Americans hover on the brink of poverty, Martin Luther King's Dream remains more pressing and relevant than at any point since his assassination.
Rather than thoughtfully discussing our political problems, including race, Americans love to reduce the conversation to feelings and etiquette. It's the personal and dramatic aspects of race that obsess us, not the deeply rooted and currently active, political inequalities. That's our predicament: Racial debate, in public and private, is trapped in the sinkhole of therapeutics.
On the airwaves, in the legislatures, around the kitchen tables, and at the water cooler, we would serve our country better with a conversation about class and racial inequalities than with chitchat about how any given person "feels."
We live in a nation that worships Latino baseball players, black presidential candidates, and Asian classical musicians, even as it diminishes, or neglects, the average non-white citizen -- overwhelmed moms, factory workers, prisoners. So, instead of asking Does Topher like Asian women? Will LaShonda marry her Latino beau? Why does Glenn have no black friends? why not ask how we can expand middle-class stability -- earnings, savings, homeownership -- to the hordes of Americans, among all races, who are one pink slip, one lapsed mortgage payment, one cancer diagnosis, one car wreck away from destitution?
Modern-day King would not be bothered by Harry Reid -- almost King's historical contemporary -- and his anachronistic gaffe. Modern-day King would be perturbed, however, by the Senate Majority Leader's inability, so far, to marshal the requisite Senate support for a public option in healthcare reform. And the intransigence of both war and economic depravation would pique the slain leader.
"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane," King declared in 1966. Two years later, the year he was assassinated, King launched his Poor People's Campaign, "a multiracial army of the poor," that marched on Washington to demand an Economic Bill of Rights from Congress.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar," Dr. King maintained. "It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." More at the link above:What a tangle of racial controversies to embroil politicians, the media, and the... more
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Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group, wielding an impact on minority growth that challenges traditional notions of race.
The number of multiracial people rose 3.4 percent last year to about 5.2 million, according to the latest census estimates. First given the option in 2000, Americans who check more than one box for race on census surveys have jumped by 33 percent and now make up 5 percent of the minority population — with millions more believed to be uncounted.
Demographers attributed the recent population growth to more social acceptance and slowing immigration. They cited in particular the high public profiles of Tiger Woods and President Barack Obama, a self-described "mutt," who are having an effect on those who might self-identify as multiracial.Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group, wielding an... more
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"Should such racial characterizations of people like Obama -- who have one black parent and one white parent -- really matter?
According to a new Northwestern University study, they do matter.
The findings suggest that the immediate response of non-black study participants is to categorize a racially ambiguous person as black when it was known that one of the person's parents was black and one was white.
In other words, when study participants knew of the person's black-white ancestry, in comparison to not knowing of the parentage, they quickly adhered to the simplistic characterization of biracial people as black, said Northwestern's Destiny Peery.
Social psychological research demonstrates a relationship between social categorizations and subsequent behavior. "It is possible that once multiracial individuals are categorized as black, for example, they may subsequently encounter stereotyping and prejudice consistent with this categorization," she said.
The study highlights the legacy of hypodescent in racial categorization in the U.S. According to hypodescent, a child of mixed-race ancestry is assigned to the race of what society considers the socially subordinate parent. Historically, mixed-race children in slave societies were most commonly assigned to the race of their non-Caucasian parent. In the most extreme manifestation of hypodescent in the United States, the one-drop rule holds that if a person has one drop of black blood, he or she is considered to be black.
"Progress in recognizing complex racial identities has been slow in coming," Peery noted. It was not until 2000 that people were allowed to identify with more than one race on U.S. Census forms.
Given the increased attention to multiracial people today and efforts to allow them to identify with all parts of their racial identity, many believe that hypodescent is an outdated rule in racial categorization.
"The question of how ordinary people categorize multiracial people remains a complicated and timely question," said Peery. "Our study suggests that knowledge of mixed-race ancestry may still serve, at a reflexive or automatic level, to highlight only one aspect of a multiracial person's identity -- the minority aspect."
What do you think?"Should such racial characterizations of people like Obama -- who have one black... more
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tired of the race discussion...i like that Obama is multiracial (i identify with this aspect), but should race be a factor in areas such as this? not sure about the answer to this, but it's interesting to ponder.tired of the race discussion...i like that Obama is multiracial (i identify with this... more
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